NEW YORK—It was an abduction that made headlines and stunned the authorities: A three-week-old infant, taken to a Manhattan hospital in August 1987 for treatment of a fever, was snatched by a woman dressed in nurse’s clothes and never heard from again.

Two decades later, with investigators stumped and the case cold, the parents of the abducted girl refused to give up hope, believing that someday their daughter might return.

Their prayers were answered.

Carlina White, now 23 and living in Georgia, was reunited on Friday with her biological parents, Joy White and Carl Tyson, bringing an end to one of the most baffling missing persons cases in the New York Police Department’s files.

The reunion brought elation to a mother and father racked by pain and anger for over two decades, and a new family for a woman who had long held suspicions about her past.

On Friday, Carlina White and her biological family met for the first time since her abduction, at the Bronx home of Sheena White, an 18-year-old half-sister who until recently Carlina did not know she had.

“We spoke and got to know each other, and she looks exactly like my mom,” Sheena White said. “It felt like we knew each other before we met.”

The improbable case began Aug. 4, 1987, when Carlina, 19 days old, was taken to Harlem Hospital with a fever.

About two hours after being admitted, Carlina disappeared from a pediatrics ward, and detectives quickly narrowed in on a mysterious woman who had consoled Carlina’s worried mother and had been seen lingering around the hospital in a nurse’s uniform.

A suspect was later questioned but could not be connected to the abduction.

“We had a description, back then, of a woman who picked up the baby who acted as if she belonged there, or worked there,” Paul J. Browne, a police spokesman, said Wednesday.

“Obviously, it has been an open investigation; some leads did not work out, and obviously had not resulted in her being found.”

GIRL SUSPICIOUS OF ‘MOTHER’

Carlina was taken to Connecticut and then Georgia, the police said, raised under a different name by a woman who treated her poorly.

Carlina’s suspicions started to grow around her 16th birthday, partly “because the family and her don’t resemble each other,” Sheena White said.

Browne said, “She has held the view, for a long time, that she did not belong to the family she was living with.”

As her suspicions grew, Carlina White started to investigate, at one point visiting the website of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. It was on that site, Browne said, where she found a photo of an infant and believed it was a photo of herself.

She then called her biological mother, Joy White, who in turn called the police, not knowing if the young woman really was her daughter.

i watched the video about this news story last night. what an incredibly difficult thing to see. the reunion was a happy ending, but it floored me to hear the audio of the mother from when her child went missing all those years ago. the anguish was incredible. it knocked me off my feet.